MicroUnity was a major pioneer in the field of mediaprocessing. Unfortunately, it was ahead of its time and was killed by power and cost of media chips on the current process. Now its reduced to filing litigation against those who adopted similar designs on smaller processes. (Source: MicroUnity)

Now Apple finds the tables have turned on it;
a small company has filed
suit against it, claiming that its devices infringe on a variety
of hardware patents. MicroUnity
Systems Engineering is a small private company based in Santa
Clara, California. The company is adopting an equal opportunity
approach, though, and is also suing 21 other companies, including
Google, AT&T, Palm, Nokia, Motorola, HTC, LG, Qualcomm, Samsung,
Spring, and Texas Instruments

The company may sound like a
patent monger, but there's more to the story -- the firm actually was
once home to some of the brightest engineering talent in the
industry. The company was founded by John Moussouris and Craig
Hansen, two of the engineers who developed the now famous MIPS CPU
microarchitecture. The company functions primarily as a
research and development firm and has a wealth of intellectual
property. In 2005 it received a $300M USD from Dell and Intel
in a suit over some of its IP. A similar suit against AMD and
Sony over their GPUs was settled in 2007.

Microunity says that
media processing technology inside handsets like the iPhone 3GS, iPod
Touch, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre, Google Nexus One, and the Nokia N900
steals from its patented work. MicroUnity says the 22 parties
named in the suit violated the following patents it holds:

U.S.
Patent No. 5,737,547,
"System for Placing Entries of an Outstanding Processor Request
into a Free Pool After the Request Is Accepted by a Corresponding
Peripheral Device."

U.S.
Patent No. 7,660,973 B2,
"System and Apparatus for Group Data Operations."

Microunity
developed technology in a number of fields including semiconductor
processing, system design, chip architecture, software algorithms --
a rarity in the industry. The company pioneered the
mediaprocessor business, but ultimately saw its designs flop as at
the time they consumed to much power and were too expensive.

The
company's overreaching history earned it the nickname MicroLunacy in
Silicon Valley. While it was responsible for much innovation
the flop of its mediaprocessors sent it reeling into consolidation.
The staff shrunk to 200 engineers and the company's chief business
(until the patent litigation launched) was to sell a CAD tool that it
sold in 1999.

One cannot help but appreciate the irony in
Apple's case, but it's also interesting to note that MicroUnity, once
an ambitious pioneer, has been reduced to trying to make a living off
litigation.

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To encourage inventors to find solutions for hard to solve problems, things that aren't just an idea or solution that you happened to stumble upon, but a breakthrough that requires considerable amounts of time and energy to solve. I think this should be the requirement for patents. Instead, the patent office will award a patent to anyone if the patent sounds just a little more complicated than trivial and it's not apparent to them that someone else uses a similar idea/solution.

I am sorry if I came off as anti-patents there, they do have their place, it's just the patent system is abused heavily and in its current state, it's just a mine-field for other inventors/developers, which defeats its purpose.

People had the idea of flight using a winged device for a very long time, but it was very hard to come up with a working solution. Why should inventors spend the time to look for solutions if someone else will just steal it in the end? So they should patent their breaktrough and be allowed to profit from it. But they shouldn't be able to patent just the first (flight using a winged device), only the breaktrough solution. Otherwise, you'd just stand in the way of more skilled inventors for no reason, and in the way of progress.

Exactly. In the US, the reason for patent law is written into the Constitution - "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts". If the current patent system stands in the way of that, it needs reform. Although, I'm not so sure it does - after all, science and the useful arts are progressing pretty rapidly at the moment. That doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be reformed, just that it isn't so broken as to be unconstitutional at the moment.

"Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be." -- Steve Ballmer